Let’s bring back apprenticeships!

Dale J. Stephens, age 20, is a Thiel Fellow and leads UnCollege, the social movement changing the notion that college is the only path to success. His first book, Hacking Your Education, will be published by Penguin in 2013.

The idea that the world is constantly changing — and faster than ever before — is nothing new. But what’s new is that companies and organizations are starting to realize that our generation needs to be educated — through action, not theory — on just how this new world works.

Imagine that, instead of college, you worked directly in a field that interested you, learning how someone before you has been successful in that field. Learning the critical responsibilities that are only learned from actually doing, no matter how much theory you understand. Imagine if you lived in a community with other inspired, ambitious apprentices, where after work you’d get together and share your experiences with one another.

E[nstitute], a New York City based organization, will provide fifteen fellows with apprenticeships and living space in NYC. The cofounders of E[nstitute], Shaila Ittycheria and Kane Sarhan, are focused on providing E[nstitute]’s 15 fellows with the knowledge necessary to adapt to an unpredictable future. The fellows will be placed in positions to learn and work directly from some of New York City’s most innovative entrepreneurs.

E[nstitute] will serve as a building block for future entrepreneurs and innovators by teaching its fellows how to create a tangible result from an idea—to take the back of a napkin and turn it into the next Twitter. Most of know that ideas are abundant—what’s often lacking is the discipline and knowledge to turn that idea into a business, organization, movement, or whatever it is that you want to build.

It’s great that a few organizations — the Thiel Fellowship, now E[nstitute] — are providing apprenticeships and resources for alternative sources of education, incubating ideas and proving that college is not the only path to an education, much less to success. It’s a start. But this needs to scale.

We need apprenticeship programs in every city that ambitious “students” can partake in. We need companies and organizations to team up with high schools to provide an alternative route. We need this to be accessible to anybody — not just the select few who are admitted to these currently limited and exclusive programs.

A few companies, such as Groupon’s Dave Hoover, Senior Engineering Manager, are working to make apprenticeships broadly available. He’s been running an apprenticeship program since 2007 which is now being implemented at Groupon. At Groupon, apprentices are given a stipend and living quarters and expected to learn the ropes in six months. Dave is currently working to implement this apprenticeship model at other companies.

The deal used to be that if you went to college, gave up four years of your life and incurred tens of thousands of dollars in debt, tuition, and foregone earnings, you’d be set for life with a cushy job.

That’s no longer true.

The Occupy movement has shown us that the rising cost of college is not a trivial issue. Thousands of people were willing to take to the street to protest the tens of thousands — and sometimes hundreds of thousands — of dollars in student debt they carry. Knowledge about the true cost of college — and the risk of taking on debt — is now mainstream.

In the United States, 70.1% of high school seniors go to college. A college degree has become the new high school diploma. Academically Adrift found that 36% of students showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or writing after four years of college, and less than half of students surveyed had taken a class that required more than 20 pages of writing over the entire semester.

In college, failure is punished instead of viewed as a learning opportunity, even though the courage to try, fail, and iterate is vital for innovation. Too often, college teaches us conformity rather than innovation, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning, and theory rather than application.

If college were teaching the skills required for success, 22.4% of college grads under 25 wouldn’t be unemployed, and another 22%wouldn’t be working jobs that don’t require a college degree. When we graduate college with astronomical debt — an average of $27,000 in the U.S. — we’re stuck in a narrow track, needing to find a job to pay off the debt. We’re mortgaging away our freedom to innovate in exchange for a degree.

No longer a good investment

If you want to be a doctor, medical school is a wise choice — I don’t recommend keeping cadavers in your garage. However, for non-licensed professions, college may no longer be a good investment. Since 1980, college tuition has risen more than 350% adjusted for inflation. Yes, the College Board will point out that there is a wage premium for college graduates: each year of college education leads to an 8% increase in overall lifetime earnings. And yes, this is true today, but will it be true in the future?

In 2010, student loan debt outpaced credit card debit and it was projected to top one trillion dollars by the end of 2011. We’re facing a crisis that will be as bad, if not worse, than the housing bubble crash because in the U.S., student loans are unforgiveable in the case of bankruptcy.

What happens when students begin defaulting on their loans? The bank can repossess your house, but they can’t repossess your education. We may think higher education lives in an ivory tower of BA, but it really lives in a glass castle of BS. When that glass castle shatters, university will never be the same.

Start your own company or cause

The problems I’ve outlined reflect a cultural shift from college being a vehicle to gain knowledge to a right of passage to adulthood. We don’t go to university knowing exactly what we want to major in — we go because our parents went, our peers are going, and society expects it. I know. I experienced the same thought process.

When we 18-year-olds embolden ourselves in this manner, we think of ourselves as customers. We expect certain things from college. We’re interested in the end product — the credential — not the intellectual journey that leads there. And in capitalism, the customer is always right. What students demand, we get. This leads to schools building lavish dorms instead of hiring professors.

Imagine if the millions of 18–22 year-olds currently sitting in class, copying their professor’s words verbatim off the blackboard, started their own companies, their own causes, their own initiatives. Imagine if we approached learning like French Salons, gathering to discuss, challenge, and support each other in creating tomorrow.

My goal isn’t to take down the academy, but I believe we have enough universities.

We can do better. We can unleash the power of youth to change the world.

Comments (20)

Sometimes it’s good to have a look over the sea:
Countries with an apprenticeship system (dual education system), e.g. Germany or Switzerland, are amongst the countries with the lowest youth employment [1]. In Switzerland, apprenticeship is the most common form of post-compulsory education and training and enjoys an excellent reputation. Young people may choose from over two hundred possible careers and then find an appropriate apprenticeship. The three- or four-year basic course provides an advanced federal certificate that qualifies graduates to practise a specific trade or profession and enables access to higher vocational training. The two-year basic course allows less academically inclined students to complete a recognised professional qualification (basic federal certificate) with a unique educational profile. Training is divided into three separate components:
- on-the-job training at the place of business
- vocational studies at a vocational school
- and a general course of education
No charge is made for this schooling. From the first year on, the apprentice receives a small monthly salary.

Let’s be brutally honest: A college degree is the entry fee charged by the Government-Academic-Professional Unions (credential-enforced) troika. It is a market-destroying an innovation hampering system set up by these special interests and has been largely captured by the Left.

When the student loan bubble bursts, there will be a day of reckoning that will fundametally alter the oranization of labor markets and destroy outdated and counter-productive institutions across western economies.

Three cheers for Peter Thiel, Dale Stephens, Shaila Ittycheria, and Kane Sarhan for preparing for this transformation!

I can see this working for low level jobs things like welding. But even non licensed won’t benifit but will suffer. How do you learn to program and learn the fundamentals of code with an apprentice ship? How do you learn the physics behind electromsgnetism in an apprenticeship?

Essentially this article is saying the workforce is too educated when we can simply lock people into a single job with little hope of ever changing within their own field. It would be like a programmer who couldn’t do amy more then the basic function the company asks from them. Imagine a mechanic that could fix transmissions but not know the first thing about chaning oil. except on a much more massive scale

The second paragraph describes graduate school. As I finish my Ph.d. (May) and consider where to look for a bartending job, I’m not so enthusiastic about the apprenticeship model. There’s a pretty hefty pro-buisness mantra in the message above: I run into random buisness-school undergrads having earnest conversations about the companies they’ll start once they graduate, in which they totally ignore the systemic changes occuring around the globe…resources are running out, and capitalism as we know it must change or die. American faith in capitalism is dangerous. Capitalism is not the highest form of human achievement, its just a system that worked for a few centuries. Its time to start thinking about what happens when capitalism is gone.

“what happens when capitalism is gone.” We already know what happens when capitalism is gone. Productivity and technological advance stall, political position and loyalty determine advancement and priorities, and finally large fractions of populations are imprisoned and executed top maintain the power of the sate. If you knew what capitalism was, not crony coporate-statism, you would not hope for it’s demise.

I think this is a great idea. I’m in my last year of college and even with a 3.75 average I still don’t feel prepared to just graduate and get a Job. Even when I graduate you still need “3-5 years experience”, why couldn’t that experience be during college which instead of being college, be an actual apprenticeship to what you like so you can focus properly.

Your out front a little to far ..you may own the cpmaony by the time you finish your apprenticeship,who knows. It’s kind of one day at a time with union training. It will be a good field for you ..learn it well so that you can do house work and government and school jobs so if you have to travel to work, that you can, because you have the skill. If they offer a special class take it .you will need it some time. A friend of mine owns a big cpmaony and they work all over the west coast at times and yet are local when needed. He has special supers that he sends out of town, maybe with 1 or 2 guys and then picks the rest up out of the local hall. And yes you will have to locate your own job sometimes and others you will get help from the hall. Good luck, make it a good career, by working each day to be better.

Bringing back apprenticeships is a great idea, but one should first ask why apprenticeships were abandoned in the first place. After all, they rest on the tutorial, a far more teaching technique than the lecture.

The reason is simple: economics. Apprenticeships of the sort Stephens is describing are prohibitively expensive. In academia, you find them in honors colleges and graduate schools. Urban societies turned to classrooms because they could afford them.

There are many good reasons for turning to apprenticeships, but cost cutting is not one of them.

Understand the burden of the cost.. If you go to college or university the cost burden is on you. Apprentiships traditionally burden the employer or at least a part of that cost is provided. It will also often require a minimum length of commitment to stay there to allow them to recoup their costs.

I’m 70, spent 20 years with the military and its training system that allowed me to get a masters degree. The military has a huge training system covering just about any applied topic that can be learned on-the-job and by correspondence courses. Many of the manuals are available through the Government Printing Office.

Then I did 13 years at a nuclear power plant that first trained me in security and then the operations department after passing a number of aptitude tests and an oral interview. This type program is run by all utilities with nuclear plants. I suspect some telecommunications companies do the same.

The Ops Dept training required a 6 month, fully paid, academic program in applied nuclear technology that produced an associates degree in nuclear science. That got you to training as a “step 1″ nuclear operator. The last step, step 7, was three years later and after mastering 70 binders covering 70 plant systems with over 1000 tested steps (“Show me how to start this 200,000 gpm pump.”) with a comprehensive written test for each step, One out of five weeks is also spent retraining all operators. I retired before attempting the next stage in this field, a tough 14-month fully-paid reactor operator boot camp that results in a federal license. License reactor operators can become managers all the way up to corporate board levels. The work is fascinating, tedious, sometimes quite difficult and has killed a few workers. It seems that in early manufacturing jobs the pay was greater for less skillful work. Nowadays even routine tasks are more intellectually demanding, pay less and are backed with much more training. However, many goods are less expensive and that offsets, somewhat, the lower wages. The military and power plant jobs were pretty comparable in benefits and it only took about 4 years at the power plant to reach the military retirement pay level.

A co-worker, who became a reactor operator, then quit to pursue a teaching career in math, but returned as an instructor. He recently was sent to China for four years to help start up a reactor there. People moving globally to find work may also be a growing. See FiFo in Australia that may be going on in Elko, NV with gold and South Dakota for petroleum in the USA. On the other hand a nuclear reactor operator license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reactor specific, so if that Chinese reactor was in the US, the co-worker couldn’t run it until he passed a test based on that plant.

A few years back a local computer training school was able to provide training that students could pay for by fellowships from Microsoft. It was hands-on and included efforts to place graduates. I think there are probably many programs in operation and perhaps what’s needed is a way of gathering information about these to help users decide where and what they can do.

We often don’t know what we want to do, or are adept at doing without trying out various jobs and skills. Some advanced aptitude tests exist which are more helpful than simpler tests of old. I’m also reminded about the long-popular “What Color is Your Parachute” that has helped many folks.

I’m a strong advocate of podcasts and like a few others like to listen to them at fast playback speeds which can also be applied to video material. The number of quality podcasts seems to be increasing. I monitor, weekly, just over a hundred sites and as a retiree have time to listen to 70 or more of the audio files each week. That number seems high, but look at the number of people listening to music from portable players while commuting, exercising and working and imagine if they were listening to training material… I like the comment attributed to Steve Gibson, the sci-fi writer, that the future is already here, just in pockets. Finding a way to connect the pockets may solve some of our education/training problems.

My wife went to college and there are NO jobs in her field… At least in this area. we would have to relocate or she would have to travel to work in her field. There is also saturation.. when the market becomes over saturated in some fields.

Indeed apprenticeship would give young people a better grasp at current enterprise life and skills that are required NOW (or in the very near future), but will it give them the broad scientific background that will enable them to continue learning about upcoming science and technology discoveries and innovations in the future, even two or three years ahead?
In a world of ever faster changing science and technology a strong scientific background will be necessary, whatever the job one will occupy.

When I taught “Quantitative analysis” at a business school, I encouraged young students, preparing for a Job in Marketing or market planning, to read regularly at least one monthly scientific vulgarization magazine, like Scientific American, Science Magazine, even “popular sciences” or Science news (Or French version since I was teaching in France, but Reading some in English too)… As no serious market understanding can make the economy of having some general knowledge about science an technology trends. But for that, even a marketing student must have enough general scientific background to understand those “vulgarization” magazines…
When I joined IBM, I had a strong background in economy and economic agents behavior analysis. But fortunately, I also had a very good level in Maths and Sciences acquired at a 2 years college, after the French mathematics Baccalaureate. In my first job with IBM, I had to use statistical techniques that required a good knowledge about logarithmic functions in order not only to represent statistical data, but to build forecasting models using logarithmic and polynomial regression functions.
This general Math background also enabled me to learn “A Programming Language” (APL), a language with definitive mathematical connotations. APL was pretty much in favor at IBM for “personal computing” via “time sharing terminals.

This to say that no one knows where the technological evolution can take the required skills, even at that time when I started working in the early 70s.
And with ever faster science and technology evolution the chances are that this situation worsened the ability to have educational programs that will produce “ready to use” employees. Note in passing that the International Labour Agency ILO, one of the UN agencies, based in Geneva states in its charter that “Work is not a product”

Businesses won’t be able to buy a market tested working product, in a world where the mere definition of work is changing ever faster.

The most important skill to be learned, by whatever means will be the capability to learn and to learn fast. Even better the love for learning more and more.

But this can also be linked to far more practical learning methods: using scientific background to conceive a project and test it with actually making it work.

Although I liked Matthew B. Crawford book: “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work” a personal experience with motorbike fixing and tuning.
In some of his enthusiastic comments he went overboard criticizing basic science knowledge and formulas…

These basic formulas would work whether the engine ignition is a traditional one or whether it is controlled by a microchip.

Where he is right on is when he explains that the main error has been to consider “shop class” as a place for students who failed in academic disciplines. A friend of mine who is managing a small plumbing shop, told me he has no problem finding apprentices who know how to weld coper pipes or to glue plastic pipes, but he has lots of problems finding apprentices who think before soldering or gluing, and understand how to measure an angle, a length or a curve shape… Some basic geometry that is quite necessary, whatever the piping technology being used.

I agree that colleges should move away from delivering diplomas, especially on the basis of reciting verbatim professors lessons, or even worse filling in Q&A tests.
One good element in most European education systems and exams, one cannot succeed if the result isn’t supported bey a demonstration showing that the student really understands where the result comes from.

Thank you for sharing this original thought. I mean “original”, because nobody up to now has been talking about it. I think apprenticeships have the potential to create a much more efficient learning model. Most people learn by doing, not by reading books, listening to lectures or taking tests. If you tray to cram too much information inside at a time, you will not retain much for very long. Testing a person for their knowledge has huge drawbacks namely that you are testing for memory skills, not practical working knowledge. If you learn a little and use it right after, it will reinforce that knowledge and make the learning of the subject much more satisfying.